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Home Front: WoT
Pentagon’s $10-billion bet gone bad
2015-04-05
Long piece at the LA Times that documents all sorts of problems with ballistic missile defense projects that have not worked out as originally proposed. It's a one-sided story and I'm not smart enough to find all the biases. Do defense projects sometimes fail? Sure -- that's what happens in R & D. Sometimes the new super theory works in practice, sometimes it doesn't. That's the difference between theory and practice. Does that mean the Pentagon "wasted" the money? Depends on your viewpoint. When a project yields a new defense system that works (e.g., the F14, the A10, the Abrams tank, the Apache helicopter, etc) then everyone's happy. When it doesn't, and there are lots of examples of those, well then...

Parts of ballistic missile defense work -- THADD, the Standard 3 missile, etc. Remember how the "smart" said it would never work? Some of it does. Some parts don't. I suppose we could just wring our hands, proclaim that we can't defend ourselves, and go sign another deal with Iran.

I think I'd prefer we keep trying.
Posted by:Steve White

#18  The Lockheed came out with the flying wing bomber in the 50's. Not practical at the time and was shelved until the 90's - now we have the B-2.
Posted by: Vernal Spavins7649   2015-04-05 20:21  

#17  And I again feel the need to quote this thread at Transterrestrial Musings:
Asked by Jeff Greason why we as a society stopped pushing the technologies we needed to be pre-eminent in civil and military space, the former administrator blamed it on “My Generation,” the Baby Boomers. He prefaced the statement with the caveat that he had thought long and hard about it, and didn’t have a good answer, and that it was only his opinion, and that it might be wrong. Obviously many of us are exceptions (and he obviously thinks himself one) but that was the only answer that he could come up with.

In response to a question from Greg Sullivan, he noted that when we feel threatened (e.g., being attacked with IEDs) we throw the acquisition book out the window to solve the problem. Clearly, we don’t currently feel threatened enough to do that with space technology development and acquisition.

[Update a while later]

Jeff’s answer: We don’t want game-changing technologies, because they upset the Russians, and arms-control regimes. They don’t like game changers, because they like and are comfortable with the game. Reagan administration was rare exception. Not surprised that we do not attain that which we do not want.

In commercial market, the market will drive things. If Brilliant Pebbles had gone forward, we’d have much cheaper launch today. If there was a market, we’d have satisfied it by now. If assured market, he could go to the bank and get the money for reusable vehicle.

Demand is key. Airmail-like things would help (already starting this with COTS). Could buy payloads and capability, rather than resources. Isn’t as concerned about tech development for launch vehicles, except things that allow SSTO. But it’s important to learn how to integrate two-stage stage system, and that would be productive area.


Read the comments as well, in particular the bits about Delta Clipper's funding problems.

We've basically hobbled many of our technological development efforts in order to make the Russians happy. And the result?

"You Destabilizing Assholes! YOU'RE MAKING US KILL THE UKRANIANS OURSELVES INSTEAD OF KILLING THEM FOR US! GODDAMN IT, YOUR RELUCTANCE TO PUT THE BABIES ON THE ROTISSERIES IS RISKING WORLD WAR!!!! YOU HOMOFASCIST BANKSTER BULLIES!!!!!ELEVENTY!!!!"
Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain   2015-04-05 16:35  

#16  @#4: "...that's why they call it fishing, not catching."

I am sooo going to use that one. Thanks!
Posted by: Blossom Unains5562   2015-04-05 14:12  

#15  Ditto Snowy. You know these bastids have a 'go to hell plan.' Their public relations and propaganda apparatus is second to none.
Posted by: Besoeker   2015-04-05 13:11  

#14  Here's something I found with thirty seconds of searching:

highfrontier.org/may-29-2014-revive-raptor-talon/. Maybe worthy of a post of its own.
Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain   2015-04-05 12:04  

#13  Another thought just occured to me: they know the deal with Iran isn't going to work, and they need to shift blame for the likely result.
Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain   2015-04-05 11:46  

#12  While working on a mil/homeland defense research project with an SEC school I had a minder from Oak Ridge Nat Labs stop in to visit. He was very excited about our project and was going on about it be one of 3 in the South East Conference he had the most hope to be commercialized.

Sounds like a BMI Business Developer. I'll refrain from naming names.
Posted by: Besoeker   2015-04-05 11:15  

#11  I suspect large parts of The Bureaucracy have been pursuing "arms control via goldbricking" for the past twenty-five years, under the impression that the US was the sole superpower and that there'd be no destabilization if the US never developed anything and remained dependent on people like Vladimir Putin for space access.

The same people who were supposed to be developing missile defense were also in charge of developing cheap space launch, but have also failed to do so. They've now been beaten to the latter by a private US company.

It's too bad there's noone like Elon Musk working on missile defense, and it's left to the people who pretended to be working on cheap space launch all this time.
Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain   2015-04-05 11:10  

#10  OS - quite aware of your point. Just making the context. Research can result in development but sometimes it's better to cogitate on the research before the development. (Avoids Rube Goldberg solutions.)
Posted by: 3dc   2015-04-05 10:27  

#9  ...A gentleman I have known and highly respected for many years is in the defense analysis industry, and he was once faced with someone reciting a laundry list of failed missile defense tests. When the other person was done, he paused and thought for a moment, and then very quietly asked, "Have you ever considered that some of those tests were intended to fail?"

Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski   2015-04-05 10:03  

#8  3dc, thats the nature of the beast. Not a good ROI if it were commercial.

The issue is: how do you calculate ROI for something that might deter or even halt a nuclear strike, especially one from a rogue state like NKor? And even though the individual projects may not have succeeded per original plans, they did learn a lot that can be applied to future systems that will eventually solve the problems faced. This is not an incremental problem, its a break-point problem; in other words we dont gradually have something that works better and better (ex: upgrading a B52), what we get are a series of failures that we learn from, which cause a breakthrough that all of a sudden does work and has major impact (ex: the atomic bomb).

Back to ROI: Not every failed system is a failure in terms of ROI. ROI for "Star Wars" for instance is pretty damned good for the money spent in the 80's. Consider the Berlin Wall came down without a shot fired. Ask any of us there in the mid 80's, and we would have never dreamed it - dying in a conventional then chem then nuke ground war seemed a lot more likely. my personal ROI is pretty damned high - Im alive because it worked well enough to force the cold war to an end.
Posted by: OldSpook   2015-04-05 09:13  

#7   “You can spend an awful lot of money and end up with nothing,”

What is it, 7 trillion dollars + on the War on Poverty for 50 years? How's that working for you. Maybe you should consider the old adage - you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.
Posted by: Procopius2k   2015-04-05 09:05  

#6  While working on a mil/homeland defense research project with an SEC school I had a minder from Oak Ridge Nat Labs stop in to visit. He was very excited about our project and was going on about it be one of 3 in the South East Conference he had the most hope to be commercialized.
Over lunch I was in a strange mood and asked him: "How many dollars had they spent on projects in the SEC in this time period? 5, 10, 15 billion?"
He answered: "That's about right."
I said: "You know, don't you, that this is not a large ticket item. It will likely make 1 or 2 million a year with the max being 10 or 11. If we are one of your 3 most likely to make it... in the commercial world this research would be a bad return on investment."
Posted by: 3dc   2015-04-05 09:03  

#5  Lets compare it to the 'Great Society' Johnson started to eliminate poverty and racism. That would trillions wasted.
Posted by: BrerRabbit   2015-04-05 07:47  

#4  Research & development. It means creating something that didn't exist before. And to do that, you have a lot of things that might work but turns out they do not work, and sometimes it takes a lot of time and effort to find that out. The bigger the breakthrough you're seeking, the higher the risk of failure. Now factor in the money, profit, etc. So these results are not surprising. But they are what we have to put up with to make progress toward a missile defense system.

Remember, you dont always get something on the line when you cast, that's why they call it fishing, not catching.

Posted by: OldSpook   2015-04-05 07:28  

#3  But it created a lot of jobs, whether it worked or not. Some of them were blue collar jobs, and three or four of the workers probably voted (D).
Posted by: Bobby   2015-04-05 07:15  

#2  Sh*t happens. The bigger the organization, the higher the likelihood of that.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru   2015-04-05 04:57  

#1  “You can spend an awful lot of money and end up with nothing,” said Mike Corbett, a retired Air Force colonel who oversaw the agency’s contracting for weapons systems from 2006 to 2009. “MDA spent billions and billions on these programs that didn’t lead anywhere.”

Not just a USAF problem. I give you the discontinued U.S. Army Crusader, a BAE systems masterpiece.
Posted by: Besoeker   2015-04-05 02:26  

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